


Put To The Question

by dairesfanficrefuge_archivist



Category: Highlander - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-12-31
Updated: 2001-12-31
Packaged: 2018-12-18 06:08:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11868276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dairesfanficrefuge_archivist/pseuds/dairesfanficrefuge_archivist
Summary: Note from Daire, the archivist: this story was originally archived atDaire's Fanfic Refuge. Deciding to give the stories a more long-term home, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address onDaire's Fanfic Refuge's collection profile.





	Put To The Question

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Daire, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Daire's Fanfic Refuge](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Daire%27s_Fanfic_Refuge). Deciding to give the stories a more long-term home, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in August 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Daire's Fanfic Refuge's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/dairesfanficrefuge/profile).

Put To The Question

  


  


  


_Put To The Question_

By Palladia 

This originally appeared as a Round Robin story on   
the Highlander Holyground Forum 

* * *

Hand over hand, he pulled himself up the rope from the green depths toward the light, and finally he was close enough to the surface to feel another hand, strong, pulling, catching his own. He had no real memory of the dream, just a certainty that he hadn't enjoyed it. If he concentrated, he could draw words out of the silence. 

"My name's Jake Chisholm. We're going to be friends." 

In a pig's eye, the dreamer's mind contradicted, and he let go, sinking back into the nightmare. 

* * *

The phone on the barge dragged MacLeod out of a perfectly nice sleep, and the voice was one he'd traded war stories with, wondering why he told this man anything at all. 

"MacLeod, what are you up to these days?" 

"Oh, nothing much. How's Jeanne?" 

"She's progressed to fried chicken. I'm not in Edmonton right now, but I could use a little help." 

"What kind of help?" MacLeod knew Jake's special talent, and didn't much like it. 

"Oh, just some good help. You really do have a talent for getting what you want, and I'm having a problem with an assignment." 

"What's the assignment?" 

"I can't talk about it on the phone. You have E-mail?" 

On the screen of Duncan's monitor, the lines began to arrive: a sharp, beaky nose, a quirked grin, high cheekbones, shadowed eyes. 

The voice on the phone continued, "I now know more about Etruscan pottery and practical mummifying than most archaeologists, but I don't think I've even gotten a good name yet. What do you say? Give me a hand? It's local, and your French is better than mine." 

* * *

"I dreamed I was Death." 

The I.V. running into the man's arm was straight saline, now, and he was beginning to waken. 

Jake looked at him. "You dreamed you were dead? How did you die?" 

"No, no, much worse. I was Death. I don't die. You do." 

So that was it. After all the misdirection, the evasions, the truths that added up to a lie, reality was worming its way to the surface, and reality was that Jake's "client" was just one more vector of grandiosity, probably a serial killer. He wouldn't need MacLeod, after all. 

Still, they were supposed to have dinner, and Chisholm badly needed a break. 

* * *

He watched across the table: MacLeod talking over brandy, leaning back in a chair at the alfresco restaurant. It was a softly warm evening, one made for dining out. Every time MacLeod gestured, the brandy sloshed in the snifter, but none quite escaped. He told of being a maquisard, in a war fought when Jake had been a child. 

"You're saying that the French resistance was named for a shrub?" 

"Yeah. Maquis is a nasty little bush, but it's great cover. Grows mostly along the coast, some areas of France and Spain. The coast roads were used by trucks a lot in Spain - different war - because they were easier than the inner mountain roads. The maquis is high enough to hide in, looks like there's nothing there. Then you stand up, stage the ambush, and just disappear. By the time the convoy guards get themselves organized to pursue, there's nothing there." 

Jake laughed, but it faded as his mind drew the parallel: He'd been ambushed. 

"Whatever happened to Marie-Claire?" Jake asked MacLeod. 

Duncan grinned. "She turned out to be something of a 'fraidy-cat.' She really was a pretty fearful person, and one day. . ." He was trying to figure out how to explain the Game to Jake. He found himself sketching on an envelope a minnow, closely followed by a larger fish, then successively larger fish, all with open mouths, each about to swallow the smaller fish in front. The largest fish was mostly off the envelope, just a huge gaping mouth. 

He was doing this as an illustration, but also to buy himself the time to decide how much to tell Chisholm: So long as Jake didn't know the truth of how to kill Methos once and for all, he was unlikely to stumble into it. 

"We're all involved in this Game," he began, sliding the envelope across the table to Jake. 

"Looks pretty Darwinian." 

"Yes and no: It may be survival of the fittest, but we don't reproduce. We are whatever we are, but individually, we're dead ends. Look, Jake, I want you to withdraw from questioning your prisoner." 

"I don't think I can do that. Besides. . ." 

Jake saw the faintest stiffening in the man across the table, and continued, "What do you know about all this?" 

"I know I don't want you mucking around in his mind." 

The two men watched each other, warily, weighing, the silence lengthening. 

"Tell me that we have no stake in this Game of yours, and he's off the hook. I'll tell them that he's just a garden-variety serial killer, which is what he looks like, right now. We all go home happy." 

Just as MacLeod began to answer, Chisholm said, "I'm asking Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod, and I expect that he'll tell me the truth." 

Duncan closed his mouth and said nothing. 

"So," Jake replied to the informative silence, "I'm due back at midnight. You coming?" 

* * *

One more audible hallucination, the prisoner thought tiredly, and this one complete with a headache. A part of his mind was whispering to him urgently, insistently: this meant something, he should take alarm, take action. Still, by the time the new man entered his room, he was merely sitting quietly on his cot, indifferent. 

The newcomer sat on the floor, cross-legged, his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling loosely in front of him. 

"Adam," the new one began, "Are you okay?" 

"Old Kinderhook," Adam replied. "Martin Van Buren used the slogan in the campaign of 1840, but it might also have come from 'orl korrect,' a facetious colonial spelling of 'all correct.' But I'm not Van Buren." 

"Who are you?" 

"I'm not sure. I used to know, I think, but he left. Left, left, left his wife and 24 children with nothing but gingerbread left." 

Duncan grinned at the death's-mask face of the prisoner. There was no grin returned, no flash of recognition in the eyes, just a terrible patience. 

Duncan's watch had been taken outside, but there were two clocks outside by the door: real time, and the ersatz time inside the windowless room, shown as 5 PM. In the time zone of the rest of Paris, it was 10 AM. 

"You hungry?" Duncan asked. "It's time for dinner." 

"A dinner, a finner, an Ascot race winner," the prisoner returned. "A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar." 

All the years of playing high-stakes poker kept Duncan's face straight, but his heart cheered. Somehow, isolated, disoriented by drugs, interrogated at length by an expert, Methos knew what time it really was. Methos, cheeky little Methos, had burrowed down into the layers of miscellaneous information in his mind, and still had the resources to send out a flash message. 

We just might get you out of this intact, he thought. 

Outside, as he passed by Jake on his way to get the dinner trays, he commented, " 'You're going to need a bigger boat.' " 

Jake tilted his head aside in question, and stared at the departing back, wondering where he'd heard that before. 

* * *

"Are you sure they know each other?" The man who sat behind the desk across from Jake hadn't worn his uniform for years, except on Veterans' Day, but his carriage had been shaped at West Point and he never slouched. 

Colonel Kevin Hobbs had pulled Jake out of the ranks of M.P.s in Viet Nam after noting that the quality of intelligence produced by his interrogations was more usefully complete than most. They were friends of a sort, much as a good redbone hound and a coonhunter were friends: they served each other's purposes. Hobbs fervently hoped that he never got to looking like a raccoon in Jake's eyes. 

"I think they know each other. I've looked at all the tapes of the first session MacLeod had with him, and nothing showed, but there's a similarity, somehow. I don't know for sure whether they know each other, but I do think they both know something we don't." 

"Anybody they might have in common?" 

"There was someone in Edmonton who seemed to know MacLeod pretty well. He'd been a marine in Nam, about my age. I suppose we'd share enough background that I could chat him up, ask some questions. I don't think he lived in Edmonton, though, he was from somewhere else." 

"If he's a veteran, we can find him. Appeal to his sense of duty." The colonel had a fine sense of other men's patriotism. 

"He left most of both legs in-country. His sense of duty might be a little bit diluted." 

"Money, then. Hell, what am I doing, trying to tell you how to do your job? Just do whatever it takes," Hobbs said, smiling affably. 

Right, Jake thought. Whatever it takes, as long as you don't have to get your hands dirty. 

Lately in the interrogation, Jake had gotten the impression that the prisoner was protecting not merely himself, but something more important, for which he was a container. He was beginning to wonder if the prisoner were something he ought to somehow shield from Hobbs instead of trying to extract yet one more story. Then, too, there was the other thing: he'd finally remembered the source of that comment about the bigger boat: "JAWS." 

* * *

It took three trans-Atlantic calls, but he finally found out that Joe Dawson was vacationing in Paris. He was staying at some chateau. Must have wealthy friends. Perhaps Jake could pay him a visit. 

* * *

One guard at the gate, Jake noted, and the walls stretching off into the woods. Joe had answered the door of the chateau, himself, and made no mention of hosts, leading Jake into a dining room with Aubusson on the polished floor and Sevres on the table. The meal had been laid out as a buffet. Nobody else appeared, either to eat, or to clear away afterwards. There were other people around, Jake was sure - but he couldn't hear them, couldn't see them. 

After they had eaten, Joe held Jake's elegant little caricature of Methos, printed out from MacLeod's computer. "He's one of our researchers. Works on the really old stuff. Name's Adam Pierson." 

"I haven't gotten much out of him that's useful, but what I have gotten makes me think there may be something to the "Adam" business." 

"This guy's just a researcher." Joe smiled, watching Jake's eyes. 

"And then, he goes into a phone booth, and. . ." 

"There aren't any phone booths any more. We all have cell phones." 

"Maybe he doesn't need a phone booth. Maybe he only needs a reason." Jake pulled a folded envelope out of his pocket, spread it, and showed it to Joe. It was Duncan's Darwinian fish. 

"MacLeod told me I was going to need a bigger boat. That puts your little 'Adam' back here someplace." He held the envelope at the length of one arm, smallest fish towards Joe. At the length of his other arm, his finger indicated a spot in mid-air. "Colonel Hobbs wants to know just what his story is, what's going on." 

"Why?" Joe asked. 

"'Mine not to reason why,'" Jake said, and grinned at him. 

"You'd damned well better start reasoning why, buddy. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing." Joe's voice was rough, urgent. 

"How can it hurt to know what's going on?" 

"If you know what's happening, you're apt to try to change the outcome." 

"So?" Jake could hear in Joe's voice, see in his posture, that he wanted to convey something crucial. 

"Humanity has a very hard time leaving well-enough alone. We also tend to become partisan. If the real nature of the Game were known, and the identities of the players were general knowledge, it would distort the outcome." Joe got to his feet, walked over to lean on an ornate mantel, his elbow perilously close to an ormolu clock. "You'd have people trying to control it, trying to help or hinder. 'Support Your Local Immortal.' Think what happens at soccer games. Think what happened in Viet Nam. We decided we had an interest in Indochina, and, boy, did we make a hash of that one!" 

"You're telling me that there's something going on that will eventually effect all mankind, and that I'm, we're, supposed to just let it happen?" 

"I'm telling you that I don't like this business of kidnapping someone and interrogating him just because you, or some bird colonel, is curious. Answer me this: Why didn't Hobbs get his star?" 

"I don't know," Jake replied. 

"Well, maybe you ought to be questioning him." 

* * *

"Duncan, do you know any good-looking women?" Jake asked. 

"One or two. Why?" 

"Say I'm noon. See two o'clock?" 

"Guy with the beret and a book?" 

"Yeah. He's our minder." 

"Great." MacLeod was accustomed to the idea of being watched, but not very happy with having to suborn yet another watcher. 

"The next time we go out to dinner, could you arrange for a couple of dates for us?" 

"I wouldn't have thought you'd have any trouble in that direction." 

"I don't. This is business. I want our minder to report back to Hobbs that we were with some really gorgeous women." 

Since Duncan had sat with his back to the wall and it was noisy in the bistro, the minder might know what MacLeod said, but could only see the back of Jake's head. 

"We might not get a chance to talk for a while. Everything at the Centre is taped by security cameras. They're everywhere. If Hobbs hears that we've been out with some knockouts, he'll want one for himself. He'll come to you, and ask you to arrange it." 

"Do I look to you like a procurer?" Duncan didn't know whether to be amused or insulted. 

"No, and sex has nothing to do with it. It's just for show. Hobbs is big on appearances. Trophies, medals, stuff like that. It's just arm candy. I want to get him out of the Centre." 

"What for?" 

"Hobbs called me in Edmonton," Jake began, "said he had a job for me. He didn't quite say it was for the Company, but he implied it. This was the phone, you know, I just figured he was being careful. He'd pay all my expenses, per diem, the usual. I thought a French vacation might be nice, and what the hell. Then, the other night, your friend Joe asked me why I was doing this." Jake held his hand directly in front of him, and made a beckoning gesture to MacLeod. 

"This Game of yours. You've been playing it for some time, now. Do you have a choice about it?" 

There was a pause, as the question hung between them. "Choice. Sometimes, in a particular situation, but in general, no." 

"All the time I was in the Army," Jake said, "It was sort of like that. Those people were going to be questioned by someone - the information was going to be gotten. If I did it, they had a very good chance of surviving with their minds and bodies intact. If I refused, well, there was always a flying lesson, or the field phone. See what I mean?" 

MacLeod nodded. 

Jake continued, "So, you do things you don't much like, because the alternative is worse, right?" 

"Are you trying to get me to tell you that what you're doing to Adam is all right?" 

"No. I'm trying to get you to help me lure Hobbs out of the Centre so I can have a go at him. I really don't know what the colonel wants from this guy, but I'm not at war with Adam, and I can't see why Hobbs would be, either. The longer this goes on, the less sense it makes. I just can't see what Adam has that he wants." 

MacLeod wiped his mouth with a napkin, speaking from behind it. "Maybe it's not what he has, exactly. Maybe it's what he is. Forget the women. You go back to the Centre without me, and tell Hobbs that I know the secret of Immortality." 

* * *

This wouldn't be the first time the watcher's chateau would receive an unacknowledged guest. It was an old establishment: it had a priest-hole, it had an oubliette, and behind one of the walls of a cool, dry wine cellar, there was another room, its door part of the bricks, covered by spider webs, to hide the finest of the press from the "wine-fuehrers." 

When Jake had passed his little note to the colonel, he didn't know what to expect. After all, it had been nearly forty years since he, himself, had heard the legends in Viet Nam, and a long time that he'd watched Jeanne stay a child. To Jake, it was just a curiosity, one more strange thing he tucked away for future reference, patiently fitting together the puzzle parts as he got them, without the overall picture. 

For Hobbs, the note was electrifying. It verified his suspicions about what was possible. He caught Jake in a restroom and shoved him into a stall. 

Jake, amused, nodded in the direction of the cameras, occluded by the stall side, and said, "Colonel, what will people think?" 

"I don't care what they think. It doesn't matter any more. You get this MacLeod back here so we can question him." 

"He won't come here again." 

"I'll have him picked up." 

"You know, he's a foreign national, and this is French soil. A little discretion would be in order, Colonel Hobbs. Besides, he's willing to meet you." Jake was standing with his shoulders against the wall, his legs spread to accommodate the toilet. He shrugged, said, "I can't evaluate it. You'll have to talk to him. He's at a country chateau." 

"Set it up," Hobbs said, and left. 

Jake came into the cameras' view much more leisurely, made a show of adjusting his clothes, washed his hands, and ambled down the corridor to the room where Methos lay. 

In the middle of a really thorough explanation of flint-knapping, Hobbs came in. 

"If we have MacLeod, we don't need him anymore." 

"We don't exactly 'have' MacLeod," Jake said, "And I don't know what he knows, just what he told me." 

Hobbs dropped two little vials of liquid onto the cot beside Adam. One was clear, the other pale pink. "Take care of this, and get rid of the body," the colonel said. 

"He's not going to remember anything: he's not transferring to long-term memory. Everything he knows now is what he knew before I started. There's no point in killing him." 

"There's no point in keeping him alive, either. Just take care of it." 

Jake stood, suddenly, looking down at the colonel. "I'll do that. I'll make this problem disappear. But," he said, reaching out to take both the colonel's shoulders in his hands, turning himself so that his barely audible words couldn't be lipread, "if I leave alone and unshadowed, I'll come back and take you to MacLeod. If any minders follow me when I leave, I'll take his corpse straight to the gendarmes, and tell them the whole story." He nodded toward the cameras. 

Hobbs tried, ineffectually, to slap Jake's hands away, but wound up ducking back toward the door. "I have a lot of tapes of you at work, Chisholm. I think I can trump anything you can bring up. As for these," he gestured to the cameras, "Don't count on them." 

* * *

Good, Jake thought, one less thing I have to worry about. He was carefully calculating Adam's weight, to figure how much of the contents of the tiny vials he could give: enough to suppress pulse and respiration, but not enough that CPR couldn't overcome them when he got away. He figured he had a five to seven minute window before brain damage began. He remembered the results of blood tests done: a perfectly healthy man, all values within parameters. 

As he prepared the syringe, slid it in, he glanced at Adam's face, and was startled to see a faint ghost of a smile, surely just a rictus grin. He picked up the body, had the guards open doors, carried it to his car, and headed for the nearest park. If any one was following him, it was much more subtle tracking than Hobbs' men usually employed. 

He knelt, dropped Adam the remaining foot or so onto the turf, hoping the jolt would begin the recovery. He couldn't believe his luck when it did: a gasping, panting intake of air, a hand reaching up to take his own. It was like watching some sort of reversal of a film, Jake thought, the returning strength, the smoothing out of the breathing, the rush of awareness into the eyes. With the awareness came someone Jake hadn't seen in all his questioning, Methos himself. 

There was a cold intelligence behind those eyes that hadn't been there before, and an edge to the voice that snapped, "If you want to kill me, you're going to have to try harder than that. Better men than you have failed." 

* * *

"Picnic? Are you crazy? I'm not out here for a picnic. I'm here for information." 

"Relax. There's no hurry. We're right on schedule, almost there. Have some pate. This is a very good burgundy." Jake handed Hobbs the terrine, and waited. Hobbs greedily dug into the contents with a spoon, foregoing the toast altogether. 

It didn't take long for the emetic mushrooms to hit, and in the very complete contents of Hobbs' stomach was the GPS capsule. Bent over, still retching, Hobbs was unaware of Jake coming up behind him. After a judicious clip on the side of his neck, Jake caught Hobbs before he crumpled, stripped him, searched him minutely, and carried him through the woods to the clean car MacLeod had assured him would be there. 

In the trunk, there were a couple sets of workman's paper overalls. I never thought I'd grow up to be a sausage, Jake thought, as he forced himself into the larger suit, zipping it up and breathing shallowly. I hope I don't have to move very fast. As he bent to lift Hobbs into the car, he felt the suit stretch perilously across his shoulders. He drove carefully to the chateau, nodded at the gate guard, and was met at the top of the drive by Duncan. 

"You look somewhat the wurst for wear," he laughed at Jake. 

"So, when did you get to be a comedian?" The two of them easily rolled Hobbs onto a stretcher for the trip into the depths of the chateau. As MacLeod balanced it against a knee to open a door, he tossed back, "You'll find I'm a very stand-up guy." 

MacLeod's going to hate this, Jake thought. He's already uncomfortable, and easing his distress with jokes. The room that had once cellared the best of the vineyard's output was different from the one that had held Adam, but the basics were the same: Isolation, soundproofing, drugs, a man from whom information was required, and a dogged pursuer. 

When Hobbs began to come around, Jake took his hand and began gently to pull. "My name is Jake Chisholm," he said. "We're going to be friends." 

Slowly, Hobbs' wandering eyes came into focus. "You bastard!" The force of the words made him start coughing, and Jake turned him aside so if he began to vomit again, he wouldn't aspirate. 

"I'll have you court-martialled!" 

"We're not in the military anymore, Kevin, and we're not in Nam." 

"My men will be here. They'll. . ." 

"No," Jake said quietly. "There were cutouts. It's just the two of us, and a lot of time. Oh, and MacLeod, over there." 

"You! You owe me the secret! You promised!" 

"So I did," Duncan replied. "Well, the secret is that you have to be born that way. You either are, or you're not." 

"Are you?" 

Jake's fingertips on Hobbs' wrist picked up eighty heartbeats before MacLeod replied. 

As if the admission had been dragged out of him, MacLeod said, "Yes." The regret in his voice was lost on Hobbs, but Jake heard it in full measure. 

"Prove it," Hobbs insisted. 

"Leave it be, Hobbs," MacLeod said, very quietly. 

"I want to know: prove it." 

It was a gentleman's pocketknife MacLeod fished out of his pocket, a flat gleaming sliver of sterling silver and very sharp steel. He opened the blade, and drew its edge across his palm from his thumb to the base of the little finger, cutting deeply. Blood welled up, dripping off his fingers onto the earthen floor. Then the bleeding slowed, stopped. The gaping cut began to knit. When the process was done, MacLeod flexed his fingers, made a fist, opened it. In all of this, Jake noted, Duncan's pitying gaze had never left Hobbs' eyes: he hadn't glanced at his own hand. 

Unbidden, the thought came to Jake's mind: I brought Hobbs, but he was the bait to get me here. I will never leave this room alive. 

"You're dead," Hobbs stared at the figure by the door. 

"Alas, the reports were premature." 

Three men looked at Adam Pierson with varying shades of credulity. The brick-veneered door to the room stood ajar behind him, the wine cellar's liquid glory racked in the room beyond. 

"MacLeod. Chisholm. And my dear Colonel Hobbs." Adam glanced at Jake. "We may yet be friends, but this is your cue to exit, stage right. I will conduct this interrogation." 

"I brought him here. I have to stay," Jake replied, his mind screaming inside his head for him to go, now. "I was the one questioning you, not Hobbs. If you have a bone to pick, do it with me." 

Adam laughed at him. "I swear, MacLeod! You Scots with your notions of honor! Go away, Chisholm, or I'll bore you to death. Would you like to hear more about Etruscan pottery shards?" 

"You know, you shouldn't remember telling me that." 

"My memory is a lot more experienced than most. Research, you know," Adam retorted. 

"That's why we picked you up, for your memory. Horton said. . .that. . ." Hobbs lurched to a stop, suddenly aware of the acute interest of most of his audience. 

"Yes? Go on," MacLeod said, tonelessly. "What did Horton say?" 

Defiantly, Hobbs said, "He said there were monsters, things who look like us, but weren't really human, didn't die like humans, that they mean to rule us. You," he snarled at MacLeod, "You're one of them, aren't you?" He looked at Adam, "What are you? A Quisling, collaborating with the enemy." 

"And you," he spat at Jake, jerking his arm away, "You're the worst of all. I'm trying to protect mankind from these 'Immortal' beasts, and you delivered me over to them. They are not our kind! They can't even reproduce with us, and they are evil." 

Something in the room had changed. Jake could feel it, but he saw nothing exchanged between Adam and MacLeod. Still, something had shifted. 

Adam nodded, shortly, and turned to Jake, held out his hand to be shaken. "You should come with me. It would be better. There's nothing you can do here. I've heard all I need to know." 

"I can't leave him here like this." 

"That's too bad." Adam clamped his left hand onto Jake's right wrist, reinforcing the hold of his other hand in Jake's, and threw himself backwards, jerking the bigger man off the cot, to fall beside him on the dirt floor. 

The stone walls of the room did nothing to silence the sound of the shot. 

* * *

MacLeod was a marksman, Jake thought numbly. That was a heart shot if ever he'd seen one. His ears still rang from the report, and blood was spreading on the gray paper suit Hobbs wore, his body slumped up against the wall behind the cot. 

Pierson had curled to his feet and he and MacLeod were stripping the body, washing off the blood, and re-dressing it in a jogging suit and running shoes. Hobbs still wore a look of indignation, as if he might continue his lecture. 

Jake watched them roll Hobbs onto the stretcher, and listened as Adam said, "Barge?" 

"Right. Couple hours." MacLeod gestured to Jake as Adam's steps receded into the depths of the chateau's cellars. "Help me. Got to get him up to the car and out of here." 

The unreality of the situation made Jake laugh, uneasily. "If you're going to bury him, this would be as good a place as any." 

"That won't work. Hurry." They folded Hobbs into the back seat of the Citroen, barely slowed at the front gate, and had managed four or five miles before there was a choking cough from behind them. 

"He's going to be disoriented," MacLeod said. "Control him. Do you want me to stop so you can get back there?" 

I'm losing my mind, Jake considered. I knew Adam wasn't really dead, but I saw the hole in Hobbs. It should have exploded his heart. 

Another five miles found them out of sight of any dwellings or traffic, and MacLeod slowed to a crawl. "How's he doing back there?" 

"If I didn't know better, I'd say he's all right." 

"This will do, then." MacLeod pulled off the road into the cemetery of a country church. He adjusted the rear-view mirror so he could see Hobbs, and said, "Guess what, Colonel, you're a monster." 

"Where are we? What are you talking about?" 

"It's confusing at first, but you'll get used to it," MacLeod promised. 

"To what?" Hobbs was conscious, but his eyes were still wandering, and he picked aimlessly at Jake's hands. 

"Do you have a sort of headache, a buzzing in your ears?" 

Hobbs seemed to withdraw into himself, and come out to report, "Yes. What is that?" 

"That's your warning that another Immortal is near. In this case, me. Until you know otherwise, you should prepare for combat when you feel this." 

"What are you talking about, another Immortal? Is Jake. . ." 

"No. You are. The cemetery and the church are holy ground. You're safe here." 

"What are you talking about?" Hobbs screamed at MacLeod, who got out of the car and opened the back door. 

"What I'm talking about is this." He pulled Hobbs out of the car, and with his pocketknife, slashed Hobbs' hand as he had done his own. There was a sudden intake of breath, a whimper, at the sharp pain of it. MacLeod held the hand up, dripping, in front of Hobbs' disbelieving eyes as the blood coagulated, stopped, and the cut began to heal. Shortly, it was whole again. 

"If any Immortal finds you off holy ground, you may be challenged. Right now, you're easy pickings. Find yourself a teacher, before someone takes your head." 

"Takes my head? What are talking about? Immortality. . ." 

"Has one exception," MacLeod informed him. "You lose your head, you lose your life. Permanently." 

"But I'm Immortal? I'm just like you?" Hobbs backed off from MacLeod, his face a mask of horror and disgust. He stumbled over a low tombstone, lay where he had fallen. 

MacLeod looked down at the newcomer to the Game, and said to Jake, "Let's go." 

"But, what am I supposed to do?" Hobbs howled as the Citroen's engine purred to life. 

As he put the car into gear, MacLeod replied coldly, "Live with it." 

* * *

"You're going to just leave him there?" 

"He's alive, uninjured, dressed for the weather, and in no immediate danger. Why not?" Duncan drove off-handedly well, headed back to Paris. 

"How will he get back to Paris?" Jake persisted. 

"His problem. The sexton will come around in an hour or so. Hobbs will be all right, for now. This is the man who ordered you to kill Adam, drugged and helpless. I think he's getting off lightly." 

"What if he tells his story?" 

"Hobbs is crazy, but not in that particular direction. You said he was concerned for appearances: Who's he going to tell? He'd be well-advised to keep a very low profile for a while." 

"What are you going to do with me?" Jake asked, a little surprised at the indifference fatigue could induce. 

"Is it up to me to do something with you? We're going to the barge in the hopes that Adam's done more towards a meal than just drink up my beer, and I'll have a talk with your tailor." 

In the passenger seat, braced against the door, Jake was expecting something much more serious than a mild complaint about a friend's drinking habits. 

The sharp tang of a reducing tomato sauce filled the barge, but Adam lounged on a couch upside down, his feet draped over the back, as if planted there. "It's a good thing I waited until you actually showed up to put in the pasta. 'A couple hours,' you said - it'd be mush!" 

By the time Jake got out of the shower there was a judogi on the bench. The soft cotton felt good after the paper suit, but as Jake wrapped and knotted the belt, he felt slow, inert, as though he were going through motions that his body remembered with no help from his mind. Why should he feel like he was wading through chest-deep molasses? 

All three ate practically in silence, wolfing down huge amounts of the pasta and bread as if feeding a long-starved hunger. 

"I don't suppose it would do much good for me to send Hobbs my expense account, would it?" Jake asked. 

The snickers grew to actual laughter as the picture this implied gelled into focus. 

"Why not? He got what he said he wanted: the secret of Immortality. He might take it a little personally, though." Adam's sly smile and sideways glance at Duncan would make a good sketch, Jake thought. 

"Did you ever find out why Hobbs didn't get his star?" Duncan asked him. 

"I talked to one of my old buddies back at Bragg. There's grapevine, and then there's the Army kudzu. If it's there to be known, somebody knows it. He had a company clerk put him in for a medal he hadn't earned. Someone found out. He got to retire, and he got his pension, but not the star." 

"He have any family?" 

"Wife and kids. Used." 

"'Used?'" 

"He married a hero's widow. I guess he thought it might rub off." 

"Ten pounds says he won't make it six months," MacLeod said. 

"You want in on the Watchers' pool?" Adam asked. 

"Yeah. That's why I'm telling you. I can't exactly bet him on the tote board." 

"You can't kill him off, yourself, either, just to win." 

"Not for ten pounds. Takes at least twenty." 

Jake had heard of gambling on people's lives, before, but this ridiculous. "Who's got the best odds?" 

"Duncan, here, is pretty good. There's some real old guy, but we all think he's out of play." Adam stood at the back of the couch where they'd first found him, and let himself fall, winding up with one socked foot lopped over the back, wiggling his toes at them. 

* * *

Round Robin Home 

© 2001 Palladia   
Please send comments to the author! 

General Disclaimer: the concept of Immortality and any characters from the _Highlander_ universe belong to Davis/Panzer Productions, et al. No copyright infringement intended, there is no monetary gain, yadda yadda yadda. 

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